The Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) and its founding partners, including The University of Texas at Austin, are pleased to announce that two contracts have been awarded this week to advance the design of the Giant Magellan Telescope mount. This will lead to a final selection next year of the contractor to fabricate and deliver the structure.

Astronomers expect that the first galaxies, those that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, would share many similarities with some of the dwarf galaxies we see in the nearby universe today. These early agglomerations of a few billion stars would then become the building blocks of the larger galaxies that came to dominate the universe after the first few billion years.

Taking a picture of an exoplanet — a planet in a solar system beyond our Sun — is no easy task. The light of a planet's parent star far outshines the light from the planet itself, making the planet difficult to see. While taking a picture of a small rocky planet like Earth is still not feasible, researchers have made strides by snapping images of about 20 giant planet-like bodies.

Pasadena, Calif. — The Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) today announced that Arizona State University (ASU) has joined the mission to build the world’s largest telescope, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). The University of Texas at Austin is a founding partner of GMTO, and welcomes our colleagues from Arizona State to the organization.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is expected to launch in 2019. Steven Finkelstein leads one of the chosen Early Release Science projects as principal investigator, and several other UT astronomers play important roles in other Webb projects.

AUSTIN, Texas — NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, is expected to launch in 2019 after decades of development. Now the agency has announced the scientists who will use the $8 billion telescope first, testing its instruments to prove it’s in good working order. Steven Finkelstein, an associate professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, leads one of the chosen Early Release Science projects as principal investigator.

A Hubble Space Telescope view of the field that CEERS will survey. This field has been imaged by several surveys with Hubble, including AEGIS and CANDELS. A larger version (133Mb) of this image is available; click here to access. (Credit: Anton Koekemoer/STScI)

Pasadena, Calif. — The next generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V), directed by Juna Kollmeier of the Carnegie Institution for Science, will move forward with mapping the entire sky following a $16 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The grant will kickstart a groundbreaking all-sky spectroscopic survey for a next wave of discovery, anticipated to start in 2020.